Culpepper blew a gray cloud of smoke my way. “Where’ve you been hiding yourself, Ray?” I was going to tell him the part about Dayton and Eureka, but he continued: “The fair closes in a little over a month. Where do you think that puts the cast of the Folies Bergère? Haven’t you been reading the papers?”

“Oh,” I said, embarrassed I’d been so dense.

After France had surrendered to Germany, the victors had allowed the eighty-three-year-old Marshal Pétain to govern Vichy France. This had turned out to be the equivalent of the cruel schoolmarm letting the class snitch preside over the students while she went to the ladies’ room. Eager to demonstrate to Berlin that a goosestep would come naturally to a nation fed on paté de foie gras, Pétain had turned over to Germany all naturalized Jewish immigrants, even though they were French citizens, and passed laws against all native French Jews. Elected officials who were Jewish had to resign their positions. Jews could not serve in the armed forces, be teachers, or be involved in journalism or entertainment.

Hitler had promised France and the rest of Europe that his gift to them would be “a Jewless peace.”

“I had a talk with the Folies company manager just now,” said Culpepper. “When the fair ends, their plan is to sail to Lisbon, then Bizerta, then to Dieppe, at which point Marie Prasquier—she was born in Algeria—would have been separated from the others and delivered by freight train to a detainment center. Apparently if you’re a Jew, you lose your job, your savings, your personal property. . . . It couldn’t get much worse than that, could it?”

I’d read a story the week before about a ship that had been chartered by German Jews to get them out of their country. It was all done legally, with the permission of the German government, but no country would let them in, including the United States. They were finally booted from Cuba and sent back home. The ship’s crew couldn’t police every cabin. There were thirty-five suicides by the time the boat landed in Bremerhaven. Five other passengers leapt to their death in the harbor.

Culpepper said, “Apparently Miss Prasquier had been trying to snare an American for weeks, coming on to any tourist who wasn’t wearing a ring on his left hand. Sorry if that hurts your feelings.”

“I gave up my feelings for Lent,” I reassured him and gestured toward Marie’s nude photograph, which in addition to being lovely and mysterious would now be forever tragic as well. “You’d think somebody with her figure alone would have had no trouble—”